Hotel World (22 page)

High in the north on a street in a town in the misty, cold-bound Highlands, the ghost of Mrs M. Reid is back in front of what used to be her shop, where she sold sugar-sticks and humbugs, gums and liquorices, peppermints, lozenges, chocolate moulded into shapes, new factory-made sweets, fudges she made on the premises herself at the back where there’s now a square of tarmac for a car park. So many tooth-rotting things displayed in jars and sold here to so many people for so many years; the bagging them, weighing them, wrapping them, taking the money. Yesterday two men broke the shop sign off the front above Keiths’ the Stationer, because Keiths’ the Stationer is getting a newly designed sign, and underneath on the shop front the original sign is still there and this is what it says, what it’s said under there for seventeen
years, what it’s said in the dark under all the other signs for over a century since Mrs Reid had it painted and opened her shop after the death of her husband, a man who had forbidden her to open a shop because it would embarrass him, a man she hadn’t much liked, a man about whom the people of the town, sucking her peppermints in the Free Church on a Sunday, discussed the rumour they’d confected that she did it herself, with hot chocolate made the foreign way by melting down squares of it over the heat and adding poison for rats; none of which concerns her now, stately and
fin de siècle
written up in paint that hasn’t faded, back above her place of business for the light of one more day: Confectioner ~Prop. ~ Mrs M. Reid.

Down the country and over the border, speeding away from the massed northern ranks of the ghosts of centuries’ worth of anger-wakened warriors baring their wounds and waving their warty shields, the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales, historic and royal ghost, ghost of a rose, ghost in a million stammering living rooms, ghost again today on the pages of this morning’s
Daily Mail
, still selling its copies by breathing her back to a life that’s slightly more dated each time, is smiling shy and sweet, as a girl, in a tiara, in a hacking jacket, holding a baby, holding a bunch of flowers, looking off to the side in a fetchingly modest way, waving from a carriage; in a few hours’ time, with the morning well underway, she will float, merciful, eyes full of sorrow, above all the squeaky postcard racks of the newsagents and
post offices, above all the teatowels and cups and trays and coasters graced by her graceful full-of-grace face in the many souvenir shops of turn-of-the-century England.

Low in the south in the hazy city the faded shade of Solomon Pavy, child actor who died aged
scarse thirteene
nearly four hundred years ago in the summer of 1602, resentfully woken and set loose again every time someone reads the poem written to his memory by Ben Jonson, who knew him when he was a Child of the Queen’s Revels, is loitering in the reconstructed Globe Theatre, quite like it was, though not near good or dirty enough. The mere idea of him roams about backstage, and up in the gallery and balcony. The theatre is closed for the season. It’s too early for visitors to the restaurant or the carpeted corporate foyer. This year here there were many plays on by many different writers of the Renaissance, though Solomon Pavy himself (in the teeth of the mournful poem by Jonson which robbed him of proper and soothing oblivion) chose to favour Will, who wrote the Errors before his birth, the killing of Caesar when he was living, and Cleopatra after his death, to his eternal regret, the boy who only ever got to play old men, who never got to know what a Juliet he’d have made had he seen his salad days, but Juliet go hang for what a Cleopatra – oh happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony – as high-voiced and silent he crosses the wooden stage, out into the barren crowdless space, over the wall in a single vault to hover by the river above the heads of the
people up early for work or the people coming home from work who traipse the side of it on the brand-new walkway. And further along the line of the river, murky and continuing, out at the site of the Millennium Dome, historic monument to the temporary whose belled-up insides are filled with panic, bluster, rhetoric and air as the new year edges nearer, the fall of a rope from the roof to the floor calls them back for a moment, the choked ghosts who fell to their deaths on the gibbet that stood there before any Dome did, who swing back and fore past the sleepy nightwatchmen, through wired-up security gates, surveillance cameras recording them, absent.

Anywhere up or down the country, any town (for neatness’ sake let’s say the town where the heft and the scant of this book have been so tenuously anchored) the ghost of Dusty Springfield, popular singer of the nineteen sixties, soars, sure and broken, definite and tentative, through the open window of a terraced house on the corner of Short Street. Over the streets she goes, and the gardens, the spread of estates and the dump, and the black canal with its fetid banks and the swimming pool and the hotel with its pristine and rumpled rooms and up into the sky, dwindling down into town in a voice so faint now it’s lost, it can’t be heard. Which doesn’t mean to say it isn’t there; back in Short Street there’s no mistaking The Look Of Love, it’s in your eyes, a look your heart can’t disguise; her hair is high on her head and she is kohl-eyed, young, she moves her arms as if she’s holding something close to her, then as if it’s flung or flown away; a look that’s
saying so much more than just words can ever say; a look that time can’t erase; she tells everybody who listens, anybody who can hear, that she has waited, how long she has waited, and the neighbours on and round Short Street, who are woken most work-day mornings at seven by the volume of it coming out of 14 Short Street, are lying in bed with pillows over their ears and their heads, scowling into too-early coffee made too fast or weak or strong, shouting abuse at the walls of the bedroom, ringing to leave another message on the council helpline, looking in anger out of the window or the open door in the direction of the noise, grimly listening through it to the eight o’clock news on Radio 4, having details taken down again by the man about to go off shift at the reception desk of the police station, crossing the road so as to knock on the door of number 14 Short Street and, if he or she has the decency to answer the door, to threaten the person with a beating, again, sleeping through it regardless, or listening, even joining in, with the ghost of Dusty who’s nearly done now, whose song is in its last fragile cheap crescendo, as she sings
don’t ever go
, as the three minutes thirty seconds of song (and behind it all the two-minute, three-minute songs there have ever been about the comings and goings, the gains and the losses, the endless spinning cycles of love and the trivia of living) come, as if on the spread grey wings of common collared-doves descending above a garden to land on the still-wet branches of the crab-apple tree, smoothly, inexorably, down to their close.

*

Morning. The lady who cleans the steps every morning, and the paving outside with the word
Global
tiled into it, has emptied her bucket and put it away with the mop in the store cupboard. She has gone home, hours ago. The word
Global
is still clean; not many people have walked over it yet.

The checkout girls who work in the supermarket are eating breakfast in their work clothes in houses all over town (except for the girls who are part-time, and those whose day off it is, many of whom are still sleeping in beds or making breakfasts for children and men).

The people who bought prescriptions in Boots the Chemist yesterday are feeling better, worse or the same. Some have colds. Some have infections. Some have nothing wrong with them. Some feel drowsy and ought not to operate machinery today. Some have temperatures going up or coming down. Some have healed in their sleep and will wake up refreshed. Some have found, or will find when they wake up, that taking medicine has made no difference at all to how they feel.

The people who queued outside the cinema to see a film yesterday are either awake or asleep. A small percentage of them remembers seeing the film at all.

The driving instructor is drinking Horlicks for breakfast; caffeine makes her jumpy. She is thinking of the feel of the learner driver up inside her. Her husband is having trouble with his tie. She is smiling and answering the questions he asks her, thinking of the feel of the push of the boy up amongst her clothes in the car.

The learner driver is awake in bed going over the lessons he’s had so far. Is she a good teacher? his mother asked him last night (his mother is paying for the lessons). Yes, he said. He blushed. She’s a really good teacher, he said, she says I soon won’t need dual controls and that with the right number of lessons I will easily pass. He has ten more lessons lined up. He is wondering what else he will learn.

The woman who runs the café is waiting in the quiet that comes before the rush every morning. She has made herself a bacon sandwich and is reading today’s paper. It is about unnatural perverts again; it isn’t as good a story as yesterday’s, about the people eaten by sharks. But it raises her moral certitude, which makes her feel cleansed.

The man whose son drove off yesterday, leaving him waving on the pavement, is looking out of the back window into his garden. He has put up bags of nuts on the tree for the birds. The winter birds delight him. There’s a chaffinch. There’s another chaffinch.

The man who was angry at the lovers pawing each other at the bus stop yesterday is asking his wife to help him fix his tie. Come here, she says, and takes it out of his hands and threads it round his collar and back into itself, over, under, tightened, down. She kisses his cheek. He goes through to the hall and looks in the mirror; he is angry, though he can’t think why. He opens the front door, shouts goodbye.

The lovers drunk at the bus stop yesterday are in bed.
He is trying to sleep a little longer, but his hangover hammers his eyes open whenever he closes them. She is awake, tapping ash from a cigarette into a cup. She smiles down at him; bleary, he smiles back.

The builder is sitting on a plank sticking out of a loft extension three storeys up in the air. He is about to wake any people still asleep in the nearby houses with his drill. It is time they were up anyway. Someone, a girl, goes past on a bike. He waves down to her. He doesn’t know her. She doesn’t know him. She waves back. Morning, love, he calls. He is cheered up. He puts his drill down, looks out over the neighbourhood and begins to whistle the tune of a song he knew when he was a boy.

The woman who was struggling along the road yesterday opens one of the awkward things she was carrying then. It is a plastic container of orange juice as big as her upper body. The more you buy, the cheaper it is. She balances its weight against herself and fills four glasses. She puts them on the kitchen table, one in front of each child.

The woman too large to fit into the swimming pool cubicle is on her bed. She is reading a book and eating a banana. Her cat has made a nest for itself in the folds of her stomach. It has spent the last quarter of an hour grooming and cleaning and is now purring up at her with eyes full of love.

The girl who works in the watch shop is just out of the shower, dry now, sitting on the end of her bed. Her hair is all over her face. She shoves it back behind her ears. She
straps her watch to her wrist. It is not her watch. It belongs to someone else, a customer. A girl came in with it in the summer and hasn’t been back to collect it yet. It is a really nice watch; there are hundreds like it, all made the same, but this one’s strap has been softened by being worn so that the feel of it is warm, and it’s keeping good time since it was mended. When she does come back to ask for it, the girl who works behind the counter is ready to say, Hello, here it is. I was wondering when you’d be back for it. I didn’t think you’d give up on it. It’s a really nice watch. She won’t mind, the girl thinks every morning when she puts the watch on.
S. Wilby
, it said on the packet in the filing drawer; the girl checked through the files for it when Mr Michaels was away at the sales conference, and found it and opened it, took it out and looked at it. For weeks on end the watch had been shut in a drawer of mended watches, all sealed in separate packets and ticking away to themselves.
S. Wilby. £27.90. Water in the mechanism
. Twenty-eight pounds; quite a hefty charge for a watch like this one. She put a line through it in the file-book and wrote the word
default
next to it, cancelled it on the computer, folded the invoice up and put it in her pocket. She took her own watch off. She slung this other watch round her wrist. The buckle slid into its usual groove. She and S. Wilby have similar-sized wrists.

The girl who works in the watch shop has never done this with anyone else’s watch. She is surprised at herself. S. Wilby stood outside the shop, for days, shy and slight,
undemanding, intriguing, looking down at her feet all the time. She had pretended not to notice S. Wilby. She doesn’t know why she did that. It seemed the thing to do. She wasn’t ready. The timing was wrong. It was embarrassing. It’s embarrassing now, when she thinks about it, and when she does she can feel small wings moving against the inside of her chest, or something in there anyway, turning, tightened, working.

The girl who works in the watch shop has looked up all the Wilbys in the local phone directory and written down their numbers. One day she is going to have guts enough to call them up one after the other and ask whoever answers if there is an S. Wilby at this number whose watch is still waiting to be collected.

In the kitchen she pours cereal into a bowl, then milk. Her mother is at work. Her brother isn’t up yet. She gets a spoon from the draining board. She checks the face of the watch. Nearly eight. She will have to walk to work, he isn’t up. She will leave in quarter of an hour so as not to be late.

Every morning she thinks it as she fastens the watch on. It is today. She will put her bare wrists on the counter and say, I’ve come to pick up a watch, for Wilby. The girl in the watch shop will show her the watch on her own arm. I hope you don’t mind, she will say. I kind of took a fancy to it.